


Tetrodotoxin (working title)

by gentlemanofquality, NewtTaylor (gentlemanofquality)



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Ace Sub Raleigh, Asexual Character, Dom Mako, Dom/sub, Dont drift with a kaiju is what im saying, Dysphoria, F/F, Fear of Flying, Ghost Drifting, Group Marriage, Kaiju Blue, M/M, Medication, Mind Reading, Mood Disorder, Multi, Mutant Children, Nonbinary Character, Original Character(s), Other, Panic Attacks, Polyamory, Pregnancy, Psychic, Resolved Sexual Tension, Tattoos, Trans Newt, Unforseen Concequences, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension, children in peril, sorry about All the Tags i just feel it neccesary to like... yknow. Warn yall., transgender character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-13
Updated: 2014-03-26
Packaged: 2017-12-29 06:38:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 11,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1002155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gentlemanofquality/pseuds/gentlemanofquality, https://archiveofourown.org/users/gentlemanofquality/pseuds/NewtTaylor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's been half a year since the Breach was closed, and the Pan-Pacific Defense Corps' mission has changed from defense to medical and social aid, assistance in rebuilding infrastructure, and combating the effects of Kaiju Blue. Newt and Hermann's friendship (if that's the right word to use in this situation) is better than ever, but almost every night Newt wakes up terrified from a dream about flying.<br/>A train station accident leads to a terrifying discovery about Kaiju Blue that Newt and Hermann cannot face on their own, even without taking into account whatever's growing between them...<br/>Contains a great deal of post-film headcanon but it's going to be soo worth it, I swear.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. cetrifugal force

_He’s strapped into a cushioned seat, a tinny voice muttering commands into his ear. The words fluctuate between German and English, commands and weather updates and phonetic alphabet and gibberish that he somehow understands. His hands are gloved and wrapped tightly around joysticks, steady and firm. For some reason he feels ecstatically happy._

_Through the opacity of his helmet, he sees a blurring of clouds and streaks of sunlight past the glass of the cockpit. He says something he doesn’t understand into the microphone of his headphones and gets an garbled reply. Somehow he knows what it means, and is reassured by it._

_An indicator light comes on to his right. He flips a few switches and pulls the central joystick towards him. He is now flying upwards at an incredible speed._

_Part of him recognizes what’s happening, has done this before a thousand times in his dreams, like a simulator for an impossible fantasy. But suddenly that part of him is no longer in control. Suddenly he’s alone – though he hadn’t realized that anyone had been with him until this moment – and all he has left is complete and utter terror._

_His hands, his feet, are shaking. He feels a bubble of panic burst in his chest, lungs feeling tighter and heart beating faster and faster. Yet he’s continuing to increase in altitude, dials showing decreased air pressure and ice crystallizing at the edges of the cockpit. He presses any button he can find, flips any switch, tries to block out the incoherent shouting coming into his earpiece. Tries not to let the darkness at the edges of his vision close in. His hands leave the joystick._

_And then he’s falling._

Newt sits up violently, gasping for breath and beating his sheets off his body with arms and legs. His white t shirt is sticking to his back, sending an uncomfortable chill down his spine even as his lower body feels swelteringly hot. He swings his legs over the side of his bed and puts his head in his hands, swiping his hair off his forehead and wiping sweat away as his breathing slowly returns to baseline.

His mind is racing, still chasing the tendrils of a nightmare that isn’t a nightmare. He used to dream about flying as a child, waking up just this way, anxious and afraid, so he knows what a nightmare feels like. This doesn’t feel like a nightmare.

His thoughts jump, jumbled up and restless. His vision is blurry and dim, and his hands are shaking. He can’t string thoughts into a coherent argument when he is like this. Hopefully if he goes back to sleep he’ll be more stable in the morning. Hopefully.

He stretches and lies back down, throwing an intricately designed arm over his eyes and regulating his breathing. In less than ten minutes he’s drifting off again.

His last thoughts are a train of numbers with no meaning, the instrumentation panel of a fighter jet, and an unsettling sense of disconnect with his limbs, and then he’s asleep and dreamless.

**CHAPTER ONE**

Newt pours himself a glass of guava juice with little to no enthusiasm. A lack of sleep isn’t the best foundation for a happy day, and he’s settling into the routine of mediocrity with astounding speed.

The dreams have been getting worse, more and more vivid, lately. Dreams about flying and sometimes (embarrassingly) dreams about people he’s never met in his bed. He hasn’t told anyone about them, because he doesn’t think they’re important. Dreams don’t _mean_ anything. But that hasn’t stopped them from making him dead tired.

Washing his face this morning, he saw dark circles under his eyes. They’re almost nostalgic for him, reminding him of days not so long ago without a steady work schedule, when alien attack was a threat constantly lurking around the corner and he was one of two scientists equipped to fight back. These days, of course, a decrease in danger means an increase in applicants, and he and Hermann now control a whole division of inquisitive college students, old people who remember the Cold War, expats, kaiju groupies, geeks, doctors, biologists, chemists, astrophysicists, even an osteopath, and they spend most of the day around microscopes and centrifuges, looking for The Cure.

Picking up his e-reader, Newt opens Jurassic Park – an oldie, maybe, but a goodie. Lots of anatomically incorrect prehistoric kaiju running around. The old movie was a favorite of his as a kid too. He spoons oatmeal into his mouth as he reads, relishing the texture and the bursts of sweetness from the brown sugar/maple crystals interspersed throughout the bowl. Hermann often tells him that there’s nothing better than fresh foods, but he has to differ when faced with instant oatmeal this choice.

His phone buzzes and he taps it, putting it on speaker.

“Mmmghmm?” he says, voice muffled by a mouth full of breakfast cereal.

“Blast it, where _are_ you, Newton? The briefing starts in fifteen minutes and Hiroshi says he didn’t see you get in,”

It’s Hermann. Of course. No one else would call _before_ he was late. Newt swallows and replies, taking a chance:

“Yeaaaah, I’m on my way now. The traffic is absolutely _unbelievable_ down here, you, uh, wouldn’t believe it-”

“You take the train to work, Newton. Don’t pretend you’re not sitting at home eating pancakes and reading the gossip columns!”

Technically, saying “I’m not!” isn’t a lie, so Newt says it. Indignantly.

A sigh scratches through the phone’s speakers. Newt can practically see Hermann’s face, exasperated and impatient under straight-cut fringe.“An omelet then. The food itself is immaterial,”

Newt swallows another mouthful of oatmeal and rolls his eyes. “Whatever, Hermann. You can’t prove anything!” He moves to hang up the phone.

“How sure are you about that?”

Newt double-takes and frowns, putting his spoon down.

A knock comes at his door.

“I’m outside, you pretzel roll. Get out here at once. I brought the car,”

With a click, Hermann hangs up on him. Newt contemplates methods of making irascible mathematicians leave one alone forever. Then he dumps the rest of his oatmeal down the sink.


	2. nujaeger base

**CHAPTER TWO**

Hermann is leaning on his cane outside Newt’s door, checking his watch and exuding an air of extreme bebotheredliness. Newt leans back from the peephole and runs a hand through his hair, making sure it’s just messy enough to get on Hermann’s last frayed nerve. He swings the door open.

“ _Finally_! We are now officially going to be late. I hope you’ve got a good excuse planned for when we get there,”

Newt turns and locks his door, smiling. “I think Tendo’ll let it go. When you’re head of KB-Science you’ve got to get _some_ privileges, right?”

Hermann scoffs. “Just get going,”

Hermann’s disability means he’s one of the few people left in Tokyo that actually drives a privately owned vehicle. This means that the two of them are parked outside the NuJaeger Base, PPDC’s “peacetime Shatterdome” that occupies all of a converted office building, within five minutes. Hermann grumbling and Newt wishing he’d brought along a snack, they walk through the large glass doors, past Hiroshi the security guard, and into the elevator bank, where three people with engineering badges are standing, presumably also late for the weekly organization-wide status and news briefing. They look fairly nervous to be around some of the most important members of PPDC, and talk quietly amongst themselves until the elevator dings and the doors in front of them slide open.

The briefing, to Hermann’s chagrin and Newt’s combined embarrassment and pride, has been held up in waiting for them for a full ten minutes. Tendo, standing on a raised platform in the middle of the sleek looking briefing/conference room, raises his eyebrows at them as they enter, but doesn’t say anything to indicate he’s substantially miffed.

Newt’s mind, predictably, wanders during the meeting. He already knows most of what’s being said, and Hermann will fill him in on what he missed if ever it’s pertinent. He fiddles with a ballpoint pen, snapping the cap on and off with his thumb as someone says something about somehow, and ignores the possibility of ink staining his hands as he thinks about how much everything has changed the past few months… heck, the past few years…

Newt and Hermann first met eight or so years ago, in Massachusetts. Newt was in a time of his life only recently come down from years of activism, teaching people older than him about what he saw as _basic_ science, arranging his top surgery, getting his first tattoos, angrily arguing on internet forums, and following the efforts of kaiju – that is, the efforts of kaiju _fighters_. He’d been writing letters to Hermann since not long after the inception of the Jaeger Program, and before they’d met he’d envisioned the other man as as much the crusader as he was, of operating on the same frenetic wavelength he operated on (which he was only just coming to realize was not the boon he pretended it was, and was only beginning to fathom how to _control_ ). Most of all, he’d imagined Hermann as being cool. Anyone whose dad can think up Jaegers has to be cool! And sure he’d seen pictures of the guy, knew about the horrific haircut, but cool is about more than fashion, and that’s what Newt had thought Hermann would possess.

So of course he was more than let down when they found each other in that coffee shop and the other man had looked down his nose at Newt despite being (taking into account his posture) shorter than him, seen his untucked shirt and the beginnings of what would become full-torso tattoos, and gave him the coldest smile imaginable. In their letters, the shared languages of science, maths, German, and English gave the two of them a unique space in which to interact. Hermann matched Newt at every turn, their intellects performing some complex dance of formulas, of atomic bonds and cellular regeneration, of theories and facts and healthy scientific discourse that made Newt feel _understood_. 

But Hermann, then and now, is a man of numbers. And, despite what Hermann says about music just being math, Newt sees the world like a rhapsody, the b-side of a record he’s never heard, beautiful and unpredictable and full of possibility. Given the choice, as they were that day, they would never work together.

Of course, only three years later they were both given offers they couldn’t refuse by the Pan-Pacific Defense Corps and ended up working together anyway. In close quarters, their personalities clashed immediately, but they didn’t have much choice in the matter, as they were (and are) the most qualified in their respective fields.

So an uneasy peace was struck, and their verbal barbs softened over the years until what they had would really be described more as a “friendship” than anything else.

At least that’s how Newt sees it.

 “Newton!”

He jolts back into the present and accidentally jabs the pen he’s been playing with into his leg.

“Ow!”

Herrmann _smirks_ at him, but half a second later his face is back to carefully professional. “Serves you right for not paying attention. Come on, the meeting’s over. We have work to do,”

“Yeah, right,”

The new lab is considerably larger and _considerably_ nicer than the good old Hong Kong Shatterdome lab. Newt kind of misses the organ strewn concrete and dusty old chalkboards, but Hermann couldn’t be happier about it. A good scientist never passes up a better lab.

The doors say “KB-SCIENCE”. The words are in white on frosted glass and couldn’t look more unlike the old military-style caution tape edging and big red K-SCIENCE danger signs Newt and Hermann grew used to. Instead of anxious technicians running in and out at all hours, the KB Science team is well staffed and works in carefully planned shifts. Newt just can’t get used to it.

At least he still has his dear kaiju organs to dissect, that same chunk of brain attaching its freaky tendrils to the side of the tank like a terrifying alien octopus, and he’s still permitted to speculate as much as he wants about The Cure.

Well, calling it “The Cure” is really a misnomer, as KB-Poisoning isn’t an illness. If anything, what they’re looking for is an antidote, but the focus groups said “cure” sounded much more promising. What Newt and the rest of KB Science know that most people don’t is that at this point there’s really trace amounts of Kaiju Blue in pretty much everything – water, air, crops, everything’s just a little bit bluer. This has a good and a bad side. The good side is that this means that humanity’s tolerance for KB’s toxicity is likely to increase over time. The bad side is that they don’t know the full repercussions of the years and years of fresh alien blood tainting Earth’s water supply. The most they can do at this point is work to find The Cure so that those who are affected by KB-Poisoning can live 100% of the time. And that’s a pretty decent goal.

Hermann is leading a division of KB Science talking about some kind of radiation (not the Godzilla kind, more the “alien portals tend to do weird things to the atmosphere” kind. boring) and Newt is mostly focusing on tiny glass plates with some mold and some Blue sitting inside an oven. Needless to say, the lack of excitement in his life is making him extremely restless.

He’s got his lackeys – uh, sorry, his _science team_ – to work on mapping the genetic code of what kaiju tissue they have left whenever there’s no active research on The Cure on the lab floor. This is both trying and (in his opinion) very necessary, as he thinks humanity could get some interesting technological insights from the Precursors’ creations. And maybe he has a fantasy about cloning kaiju. _Maybe_. No matter his potentially dubious motivations, though, this work means that he gets largely left to his own devices in his lab.

One device is his mp3 player, an old retro thing with a measly 32 gigs of storage. It’s full of songs from his late teens and 20s, and currently blasting naughts-era electro into his already damaged eardrums. He’s fiddling with an expensive-looking micropipette, his feet up next to a stack of petri dishes, when he gets the unsettling feeling that he’s being watched.

Pulling the earbuds out of his ears without stopping the music, he whips his head around. Herman is squinting at him from across the room, his face twisted into an expression even weirder than usual. Newt can’t read it.

When Newt meets Hermann’s eyes, Hermann looks quickly away. Newt frowns. What’s up with him? Determined to find out, he gets up and walks over to where Hermann is now busily typing away.

“What’s up? You were staring daggers at me just now,”

Hermann makes an exaggerated show of finishing typing in some code or other and turns around, folding his cardiganed arms against his chest. “ _Must_ you listen to that so loudly? It’s obscenely unprofessional!”

“Dude, you could hear that from all the way over here? Seriously?”

Hermann just rolls his eyes. “Just turn it down, would you?”

Newt raises his eyebrows, frowning. “Uh, yeah, sure…” He pulls his music player out and presses the volume button several times. The tinny sound of LCD Soundsystem diminishes until nothing can be heard. “How’s the radiation research going?” he asks conversationally as he does so.

Hermann makes a vague noise in his throat. “To be honest, not well,” He rubs his forehead with one hand. “I can’t seem to concentrate today… I wonder why?” He shoots Newt a look from under his hand. Newt  gives him an aggrieved shrug and gestures to his silenced mp3 player. “Yes, thank you for basic human courtesy, Newton. Don’t you have bacterial cultures to analyse?”

“Geez, rude much?” But Newt takes the “hint” and returns to his workspace, putting his earbuds back in and skipping a few songs before settling on early Janelle Monae, at an appropriate volume of course. He taps his fingers on his knee to the beat as he waits for the cultures’ cycle in the oven to finish.

As the timer ticks closer to zero, Hermann stands up with a clatter.

“Turn that infernal racket _off_ , Newton!”

The lab is silent. The song changes to some 90s girlpop song, but Newt is no longer listening.

“Hermann…?”

The other man looks around the lab and realizes that he’s being stared at.

One of the youngest scientists ventures quietly: “Dr Gottlieb, what racket?”

Hermann, gone slightly pale and sweaty, sits back down. “I’m sorry, I was mistaken. Get back to work, everyone,” Nobody moves for a moment, so he repeats, harsher this time; “Get to work!”

Newt looks at his friend, worried, but Hermann doesn’t meet his gaze.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> in case anyone was wondering, the songs mentioned are Pow Pow by LCD Soundsystem, Many Moons by Janelle Monae, and Oops! I Did it Again by Britney Spears. Coincidentally, these are three of my favorite artists... ;D


	3. concussion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings in this chapter for what can be interpreted as an Explosion in a Train Station  
> and for Child Endangerment/Death  
> additionally i told jude id use their name. so.

**CHAPTER THREE**

Newt raps his fingers against his tray in a syncopated rhythm and shoots Hermann a worried glance as the other man pours curry over a plate of rice beside him at the buffet. He’s clearly determined to act as if everything is absolutely normal, despite his decidedly abnormal outburst earlier that morning, and Newt is, for the most part, going along with it. There’s no point in pushing buttons if he doesn’t know what reaction he’ll get.

Newt grabs a cola and Hermann gets a coffee from the machine and they both swipe their ID cards at the automated register. They’re the first ones of their little group in the cafeteria today, so they sit in their usual seats and begin eating without a word.

Though it’s not a thing like the cafeteria in the Hong Kong Shatterdome, somehow having lunch with the other vets is comforting and familiar. Newt, Hermann, Mako, and Raleigh are the regulars at the table closest to the register, though more often than not Tendo comes down from his office to join them. Sometimes, when he’s in town to do press junkets or visit with Tendo, Herc stops bye and has a coffee (he doesn’t eat much anymore, Newt’s noticed) and a chat.

Newt is scraping rice up with his chopsticks when he and Hermann are joined by Mako and Raleigh, the pair carrying almost identical trays and smiling like they’ve got a secret that only they two are in on (which, to be honest, is their usual shared expression). The pilots have changed from their streamlined red and white nuJaeger uniforms to civilian greys and blacks. Mako’s hair is still crisply cut to chin-length, though now her colored streaks are red to match the new, smaller Jaeger with its delicate hands and brightly colored paint that she and Raleigh pilot to help clean-up efforts around Japan. Raleigh has grown his hair out somewhat, and wears it (when not tucked in a cap so it doesn’t hinder his piloting) in loose braids. When he was first growing them, they made him look like Obi-Wan Kenobi from when Newt was a kid, but now he looks more like a trained spaniel than anything else.

Raleigh grins brightly at his seated friends and immediately moves to spear a leaf of spinach with a fork. Mako greets them slightly more formally:

“Good afternoon, Doctors,” she says mutedly, mirth glinting in her eyes. She knows that Newt hates formality, so she’s always at her most formal around him. “How has your day been so far?”

Hermann speaks up before Newt can say anything. “Absolutely uneventful. The teams are woefully undereducated for our needs, of course, but they’re making the most progress they can. We think we’re on the trail of the energy signatures released the very first time the Breach was opened, but it’s difficult when so much data was lost during the War. It may be weeks or even months before we have definitive information,”

Mako nods and drinks a spoonful of soup. Newt scowls at Hermann when he’s sure the other man can’t see him. For a guy so adamant about clean lab conditions, he sure likes to gloss over his personal problems.

Raliegh puts his fork down and leans one elbow on the table, angling his body toward Hermann so he’s facing him with open body posture. “If I may… that’s not what I heard. Kou – one of Newt’s lackey’s – told me you had some sort of… episode this morning. Are you okay?” He frowns, attention fully focused on his friend. Hermann grimaces and looks away.

“Kou exaggerated. I yelled at Dr. Geiszler, and that’s hardly a novel event. She’s new and will be used to our workplace dynamic soon enough,” His hands, trembling slightly, grip tightly around his coffee and he takes a terse sip.

Raleigh turns, looking to his partner for support. She tilts her head and looks searchingly at Newt. “Is this true?”

He shrugs and hides himself behind his cola can. “Uh, yeah. Pretty much. Hermann thinks loud music is unprofessional… you know the shtick,” He sets the can down and winces as the carbonation shoots into his nose.

Mako and Raleigh seem satisfied by Newt’s corroboration, and no more is said about the matter. Instead, the four of them discuss PPDC’s plan to deploy an even more specialized nuJaeger to monitor and support marine renewal in the Pacific Ocean and the search for pilots willing to operate for prolonged periods underwater.

Before long, however, lunch is over and they must part ways. Mako and Raleigh are training recruits and Newt and Hermann have research to conduct. All slightly disappointed in the way everyone is when lunch ends and work starts right back up like it never left, they gather up their trays and utensils and head to the waste disposal area near the exit. Newt moves to toss his still mostly-full cola, but Raleigh puts out a hand.

“Can I finish your pop if you’re not going to?” he asks, giving Newt his best unintentional puppy-eyes.

Newt shrugs. “I don’t see why not. But I think it got too warm in transit or something; it was really bitter,” He holds onto his can as he disposes of his tray and plate in the correct receptacles then turns around and presses it into Raleigh’s extended hand.

Raleigh wipes the rim with his sleeve and throws his head back to take a swig. After swallowing, he says, nonplussed: “Tastes fine to me!”

They’ve just divided into their respective pairs, pilots heading to the new gym and scientists to the elevators, when the ground quakes under their feet, sending some people reeling to the floor, some dropping cups of coffee and looking down in confusion. A split second later, there’s a resounding noise, the high decibel, low pitch sound of a blast. It cracks windows, knocks over decorative plants, vibrates right through the people in the building, and leaves in its wake a moment of absolute silence. In this silence, Newt’s heartbeat skyrockets and his hand grips Hermann’s sleeve. Hermann’s hands are shaking, the sides of his fingers bumping against Newt’s palm as they draw closer together in a silence obscuring even the sound of their breathing. And then – screams.

Outside the window, a cloud of dust billows from somewhere nearby. People outside are running, some covered in dust and some even covered in blood, running and crying and not looking back. Inside, there’s nearly as much panic. Technicians, engineers, civvy scientists, even a bicycle messenger, all are either frantically calling loved ones or running around looking for someone to tell them what to do, what the _hell_ just happened.

Mako and Raleigh exchange a look and nod in tandem.

“Hey people!” Raleigh bellows. Gradually, the ground floor of the nuJaeger Base goes quiet and watches the two pilots as they stand on office furniture to address the crowd. “Don’t panic. This isn’t a Kaiju. Wait for more information, do not spread misinformation!”

“We are all fine! We’re safe!” Mako shouts, first in English then in Japanese.

Newt, calmed down enough to move, pushes his way through the pack of PPDC employees to reach the front doors, which are dusty and blown open but otherwise unharmed. Through the dust in the air, he can see that the area where most people seem to be running from and where the firefighters are just now running towards is the train station across the street. His mind whirls, recalling his childhood and the rare instances of individual mass violence during the War, wondering frantically who or what could have done this.

“Newt!”

He whirls around, vision blurring then focusing on Hermann’s worried face directly in front of his.

“Newt, come on! They’re setting up emergency medical services, they need us!”

Dazed, Newt follows Hermann outside to where Tendo and a group of scientists (some of them even doctors) are setting up folding tables and already sterilizing and sewing up cuts, giving out pain meds, and wrapping blankets around shocked and battered victims.

There aren’t enough helicopters to take all the injured to the nearest hospital, and the road is blocked from one end with debris from what looks like either a building collapse or an explosion, so the PPDC emergency medical services area takes all injured not immediately in danger of death. Mako, Raleigh, and the recruited nuJaeger pilots run as quickly as they can back and forth between the wreckage and the EMS area, carrying crying, screaming, and, most frighteningly, completely silent bodies out on stretchers and even on their own backs.

Newt assists in diagnosing whether or not seemingly unharmed survivors are concussed. If they aren’t, he sends them inside nuJaeger Base, where they’re questioned by the police and given access to the cafeteria as well as computers and phones to tell their loved ones that they’re alright.

The number of people streaming into the area surrounded by caution tape that represents the EMS area as the next two or three hours pass is astounding. It makes sense, of course, that there would be so many people in one of Tokyo’s biggest train stations, but that doesn’t make it any less mind boggling. But years of dealing with large-scale disasters give the veterans of the Pan Pacific Defense Corps some amount of help in coping with the horror of seeing so many people bleeding, broken, and afraid.

As the sun begins to set, EMTs, firefighters, volunteers, and the nuJaeger pilots have evacuated most of the people they can find and are attempting to clear the rubble to search for other survivors.

Newt shines a penlight into the eyes of a woman with tear tracks shining brown skin through layers of grey. Tears are still gathering at her lower eyelids, but she allows the cursory examination.

Newt checks the first box on the forms they now hand out to healthy survivors to give them the “OK” to leave the scene. “So, what’s your name?”

“Tia Benjamin,” she responds, voice shaky with tears. “Please, Doctor, have you seen my son? His name is Jude, he’s five years old, wearing a red jacket-”

Newt hesitates, his pen hovering over the next box. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Benjamin, I don’t know anything about your son. What were you at the station for?”

The distraught woman ignores the question. “Please, my son-”

“I’m sure he’s fine, Mrs. Benjamin,” Newt bites his lip and fiddles with the pen. “Please, there are people waiting, you need to-”

“You don’t understand – We were about to get on the train home when he let go of my hand – I turned around and he – he-” She breaks down into sobs and clutches the front of Newt’s blood and dust-stained shirt, adding tears to the potent mix of stains there. Newt just can’t bear the heartbreak in this woman’s voice. He’s never been good at staying professional.

“Okay, listen, I’m going to call my friend and see if she knows anything, okay? It’s going to be fine, Tia. They’ll find your son,”

Supporting her with one arm, he uses the other to pull out his phone and dial Mako. Her earpiece picks up automatically.

“Hello? Newt? What’s wrong?”

“There’s a woman here who’s lost her son, a little boy in a red jacket? Have you seen anyone like that?”

There’s a moment of static, then Mako replies: “Listen, I’m sending Raleigh to you. Tell the mother that we’re doing our best,”

She hangs up. Newt  looks at Tia, who is now sitting on the table, looking absolutely desolate. “One of the rescuers is coming to talk to you, okay? Can I look at these other people until then?”

She nods, eyes red and still streaming. Newt waves in the next bruised but conscious person to check their vitals.

Within ten minutes, Raleigh is jogging up to the table, braids up in a cap and right sleeve torn and bloody. Tia brokenly explains the situation and describes Jude to him. He nods.

“Believe me, we will find your son, ma’am. I swear we will find him,”

With that, he turns back and runs into the slowly dissipating dust cloud.

Another hour or so passes, every second dragging on for interminable eons. Newt sits with Tia, wrapped in blankets and sipping tea, in the lobby of the Base, silently watching the significantly slower rescue efforts outside. There’s been no word of Jude yet. Hermann has temporarily gone home, though he promised to come back to pick Newt up when he’s ready. Tendo remains outside, shouting commands into a megaphone and relaying the instructions of the firefighters and EMTs that flit between the beams of the spotlights that have been set up to improve visibility in the twilight.

Secretly, Newt doesn’t think they could’ve chosen a better candidate to head the revamped PPDC than Tendo Choi, but he’ll never say it to his face.

Of course Mako and Raleigh have worked ceaselessly all evening, stopping only to grab water and give encouraging words to rescued children. The pair are inspirations, but they’ve never let it go to their heads. They seem to genuinely love being heroes.

Newt looks down at his hands, at the dirt and other people’s blood under his fingernails. He feels sick suddenly, pained and exhausted. His legs feel achy, like he’s just run a marathon. He shuts his eyes to open them swimming with tears.

“Dr Geiszler?” Tia puts her hand over his. “Is everything alright?”

Newt sits up, blinking rapidly to disperse the water at the corners of his eyes. “No, yeah! I’m fine!”

“Because you can-”

Something in the corner of his eye catches Newt’s attention and he stands up abruptly, cutting Tia off.

Among the wreckage of the train station, a lone dark figure clutches something small and motionless. The figure walks closer to the EMS area, and as it nears the beam of a spotlight Newt recognises the black and red hair of Mako Mori. What she’s carrying remains obscured for the moment, but Newt gets a chill in his stomach at the thought of what it probably is – or rather, who it is.

Tia follows Newt’s gaze and jumps up beside him, casting off her blanket. “Is that – could that be him?!”

“You stay here, I’m going to check,” he says, suspecting the worst.

Tia shakes her head, breathing out through her nose in an attempt to keep calm. “No damn way. I’m going to see my son,”

The two of them walk out into the street to the table around which Mako, Tendo, and several EMTs are clustered. Mako sees them first, and the expression in her eyes gives it all away.

Tia bursts into sobs and pushes the other people out of the way to see the body of her son, seemingly unharmed but for trickles of what looks like blood coming from his nose and ears. She wails in horror and hurls herself onto the body, sobbing against her young son’s chest, yelling incomprehensible things that convey abject sorrow.

Newt covers his mouth with one hand, feeling sick.

Mako pulls him away, hands on his arms holding him steady.

“Newt, I am sorry,”

He stares unseeing at the shaking back of the woman whose son he’d promised her.

“Newt, please look at me. It’s very important,”

He struggles to control his breathing. He clutches his chest.

“Newt, you need to see this,”

Mako pulls him to the edge of a spotlight beam, gently shaking his shoulder. He looks into her face, but she’s not looking at him. She’s looking pointedly at her other hand, smeared with Jude’s blood, brightly illuminated in the spotlight.

Only it’s not Jude’s blood.

It’s glistening, it’s viscous, and it’s blue.


	4. paris

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> it turns out newt and hermanns teams are made up of autonomous individuals who can come up with theories all on their own... well done, kids.  
> warnings for #blood, #child death, #panic i guess. and also #meds  
> i swear this chapter is ACTUALLY hilarious

_He puts a hand out, touching something lukewarm and damp and soft like skin. Echoing around him in the darkness are the sounds of screams and a hoarse, desolate howling._

_Then a light appears, blinding him for a moment. When his vision comes back, washed out and spotty, he sees his hands, and they’re covered in kaiju blood. The thing before him is a desecrated carcass of a kaiju infant. Its huge glassy eyes are clouded and dead, and yet inside the translucent chest an enormous heart beats its last beats, slowly, painfully, pumping blood out of the baby’s wounds._

_The screams are louder now, with no clear origin or comprehensible meaning, only sound and feeling and pain. He wipes his hand on his legs furiously, trying to get the blood off, but every time he looks down it seems like there’s more and more of it, dripping from between his fingers and running through the lines on his palm, warm and wet and so so blue._

_And then from nowhere a distorted human face appears, rising out of the darkness, attached to the body of the kaiju Otachi, strangely familiar and screeching._

_“MY SON! YOU KILLED MY SON!”_

_He steps backwards, looking further and further upwards as the not-Otachi rears its horrible misshapen head and screams, loud, making his teeth vibrate where they’re clenched together._

_“HE’S DEAD! HE’S DEAD AND IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT!”_

_Without warning not-Otachi releases its wings and extends its rear claws. He’s stumbling backwards, slipping on the blood-slick ground, falling, and not-Otachi is grabbing him and lifting up and off of the ground._

_He can’t see the thing holding him, but he can feel his ascent in the pit of his stomach and against his cheeks and in his empty lungs. Higher and higher, leaving the corpse of the infant and the rubble surrounding it until there’s just murky blackness everywhere save for that tiny pinprick of a blue glow left._

_His breath is whipped from his mouth before he can yell for help. He struggles against the cold claws digging into his sides. With an echoing hiss, not-Otachi releases its grip, and he’s falling._

_He falls into the cockpit of a jet, covered in blood and tears and grit. He grips unfamiliar joysticks with familiar hands and pulls the plane up._

_Outside in the dark starless sky the not-Otachi screams, and screams, and screams._

_And so does he._

**CHAPTER FOUR**

Newt kneels over the toilet bowl, hands fisted on his knees and toes curling as he suppresses a wave of nausea.

“You’re in your apartment in Tokyo, you’re in your bathroom, on the ground, you’re safe…” He clenches and unclenches a hand, nails digging into his palm, as his body very slowly begins to relax. “Calm down, Newt…”

The wall is cold against his back as he sinks into a sitting position.

That was one hell of a nightmare… Flying, Otachi, and the little kid’s death all wrapped up into one panic-inducing package. Feeling sick after all that is understandable, though odd for him; his stomach is usually almost preternaturally strong.

After a few minutes of steady breathing, Newt gets up and rinses his mouth out at the sink. A glance backwards reveals that the digital clock on the table next to his bed reads (after a bit of squinting to see) 5:43. He may as well stay awake, as trying to get a last hour or so of sleep is only going to lead to him sleeping in, and Hermann is now taking him to work in the mornings and doesn’t stand for that sort of irresponsibility. Sighing, he strips off his t shirt and shorts and turns his shower on.

It’s been a week since the incident at the train station. As far as the police and other authorities can tell, there was no explosion or other detonation. The closest thing anyone can compare it to is a tiny localized earthquake, based around one of the train platforms. But no one has discovered a source that could have caused such a controlled quake, let alone how an earthquake could so affect a building designed to withstand severe tremors.

Jude Benjamin died in the building collapse, being near the worst hit areas of the station, and when they examined the body the pathologists found that the kid’s entire supply of blood had gone bright, eerie blue.  Questioning Tia Benjamin revealed that the strange coloration of Jude’s blood was new and had never to her knowledge occurred before.

_“He gets… he got into as many accidents as any kid does. I’ve seen him bleed, and it’s always been red! Please let me take him, please-”_

Newt and his team are in the midst of determining whether or not the kid’s blood’s resemblance to Kaiju Blue is coincidence. The composition of the blood they’ve obtained from the body is definitely irregular, but without permission to examine the rest of the body there’s not much they can do – and none of the scientists involved want to disrespect the wishes of a grieving mother, not even, shockingly to some, Newt.

The general consensus about what evidence they have is that the station’s collapse must have released a large amount of vaporized Kaiju Blue into the air, and Jude was rapidly infected to the point that it got into his blood. Who knows what the effects might’ve been if he’d survived the accident.

Newt isn’t as sure about this explanation, but he’s been too preoccupied to really apply himself to the problem.

He steps out of the shower, swinging a towel around his waist, too lost in thought to thoroughly dry himself. He walks into his bedroom, wet hair dripping rapidly cooling water onto his tattooed chest, and checks that he didn’t fall asleep in the shower (it’s been known to happen). Satisfied that he’s timely, he starts getting his clothes out. He pulls an everyday white shirt out of his dresser, shaking the wrinkles out as much as he can be bothered to, and some slacks from the drawer beneath it. He tosses them onto his bed and slings the towel around his shoulders. Does he have clean underwear? A worrying moment of searching reveals that yes! He’s got a pair of briefs unintentionally hidden, wrapped up in an unfolded band t shirt.

He pulls on his clothes and trips over his pant legs on his way to the kitchen. Not bothering to button his shirt, he unscrews the cap of his lithium and pours a few of the round tablets onto the kitchen counter because that’s easier than just fishing one out of the little bottle with his fingers.

It’s 6:15, so he’s got another 30 minutes before Hermann knocks on his door and demands he wear a tie.

He opens his fridge. There’s not much in it. He could walk down to the convenience store and get some bread and a soda, but things have been… weird for him lately out in the streets of Tokyo. In stores and restaurants, he’s been calculating totals before he’s even ordered. In traffic, he seeks patterns in flashing lights and counts the seconds between the changes in traffic signals. And, for the first time, he finds himself put off by the noise of the city. He’s always loved listening to cities. They’re like experimental rock, noise music with a hidden melody behind the shuffle of steps, the growl of engines, the high-pitched whooshing of trains. But lately he’s been unable to get in the right headspace to really appreciate it in the way that he has before. So he settles for a yogurt drink he doesn’t particularly like and takes his pills.

Dinosaurs teaching chaos theory is very good breakfast reading. Newt’s eyes skim the familiar paragraphs, not reading any of Crichton’s words in depth, as he sips his yogurt with distaste. He starts thinking about animals with a pack mentality and about ant pheromones and about how exactly a hivemind works. How could the kaiju communicate across _universes_ without a physical link and can he research it without an actual kaiju and would anyone even believe him if he did?

Before he knows it, the little plastic bottle is empty, he’s two chapters ahead of what he last remembers reading, and Hermann is leaving marks on his door with the tip of his cane, calling his name in his finest and most English academic tones.

“Dr Geiszler, if you’re not out here in thirty seconds…!”

Within five minutes, he’s in the car with Hermann, slumped to one side, gazing unseeing out the window, and thinking distractedly about kaiju genetics. Hermann glances at him as he stops at a traffic light and scowls to see his apparent apathy.

“Sit up straight, will you? You’re supposed to be a professional!” He sniffs and sits up himself, clearly trying to set an example though he is, in truth, more stooped at any point in the day than Newt ever is.

“Wow, someone got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning!” Newt snips, looking dubiously at the man in the driver’s seat. “Dude, what’s up?”

Hermann tsks and flips his turn signal on. “I didn’t get much sleep last night,”

“That makes two of us, then,” Newt fails to suppress a yawn, curling up into himself, face in his shoulder as he tenses with the sudden deep breath. Relaxing back into his seat, he continues: “I got up at like, 5 or something. How do you _do_ that?”

Hermann doesn’t respond. He slows at the automated booth at the entrance to the underground car park to roll down his window and scan his badge. As the divider rises and the car moves forward, Newt stretches his back out, wincing. “Man, you should take advantage of being able to drive to work! You should listen to some music in here, dude! I’ll make you a playlist for tomorrow, yeah?”

“It’s the least efficient mode of transport I could choose save maybe flying to work,” Hermann responds without actually answering Newt’s question, sliding easily into an empty space near the elevators. “I’d rather take public transport.”

Newt frowns, hand at seat belt, already unbuckling. “It’s not like you can’t,”

Shifting to park and turning the car off, Hermann shoots Newt an almost conspiratorial look. “Well, I suppose if they’re going to give me the option…”

“You… !” Newt stares in amazement as Hermann gets out of the car to plug it in.

They’re still arguing when they walk into KB-Science and are greeted by absolutely nobody paying them any heed whatsoever.

Both teams are clustered around a computer terminal, watching grainy video footage zoomed in as big as it can get, tinted blue by the holographic display. As Newt and Hermann get closer, they can see that the clip is about five seconds and on loop, of a kid looking scared into the camera before everything goes white and the camera falls to the floor.

Hermann takes a sharp breath and Newt sees his shoulders tense.

“What the hell is this?” Newt snaps. “What are you people _watching_?”

One of the lab techs, a genderqueer redhead named (Newt thinks) Robby, answers, not abashed at all. “Paris. There’s been… another incident.”

“Incident? What incident?” Newt steps forward to get a better look at the clip. Whatever is happening to bleach out the footage it appears to have some effect on the… stone? Concrete? steps that the kid is standing on. A thick crack runs down the steps and rubble falls down against the lens of the camera before it freezes, glitches, and begins the loop again.

“We think… maybe the accident last week… wasn’t really an accident,” Robby runs a hand through their hair. “We think somehow… the child was involved.”

As the clip loops yet again, Newt catches the trickle of dark liquid coming from the child’s nose.

_God damn it…._

He puts a hand over his mouth, biting his index finger.

“What do we know?”

Another scientist, one of Hermann’s that Newt vaguely knows as Jac-something, pipes up from the adjacent terminal. “There was some sort of earthquake not far from Notre-Dame Cathedral. It didn’t cause as many fatalities, thank goodness, but…”

Robby butts in: “If the police hadn’t found this footage, if it hadn’t been leaked…. nobody would’ve put the events together! I mean, they don’t seem to have much in common besides being unexplainable earthquakes, right? But we did some more searching and…” they nudge Jac-whatever, who brings up some news article or other onto the largest display, “it turns out these earthquakes have been happening for at least a year, all over the world!” Several of the other scientists look nervously at each other.

“They’ve been getting stronger over time, which is why we haven’t noticed them – well that and we were dealing with the kaiju, so…”

Hermann finally speaks up. “This is all very interesting, but what’s the _point_?” A couple of the people on the edges of the group of underlings nod, looking embarrassed to have been taken in by the hysteria. “This is ridiculous! We don’t have any evidence that the two events are linked besides a clip of an endangered child! Do we even know their identity? Have you done any actual research at all?”

Robby and their friend shrink back.

Newt rushes to the defense of hasty radical theorizing. “C’mon, Hermann, I’m sure they researched it! Right, guys?”

The two younger scientists glance at each other guiltily.

Herman sighs and leans heavily on his cane. “What did I tell you? Dr Gieszler-” and he says his last name with _icy_ formality – “please take your team and continue your research. My team has some _serious_ work to do,”

“Seriously?” Newt lets the comment about the validity of the physical sciences slide, but he’s still irked about Hermann’s inability to see past his narrow-minded definition of scientific truth. “You aren’t going to hear this out? I mean, if this is true-”

“Which it _isn’t_!”

“Yeah, but if it is, I mean – that’s a _huge_ deal! And a problem too! A problem _we_ should probably fix!”

Hermann grinds his teeth. “Can you put aside your delusions of saving the world and look at the _facts_ for once?”

“Uh. Dude, we _did_ save the world!”

The “we” brings the two of them into silence and they break eye contact. Their teams are staring at them, used to bickering but not to full blown arguments. Nobody speaks.

Newt fiddles with the sleeves of his shirt for a second, thinking to himself: _You’d think he’d learn after I was right about the kaiju hivemind._

Hermann rolls his eyes. “ _I_ was right too, wasn’t I? In any case, the situations are completely different. You had evidence to support your claim; this is just wild conjecture!”

Newt snaps his head upwards and stares in bewilderment at his colleague, who doesn’t seem to see anything wrong with the fact that he just responded to something Newt _thought_ – at least he _thought_ he thought it…

“What’re you…” Robby starts, then seems to decide that it’s not in their best interests to question Dr Gottlieb when he’s angry.

Kou, standing a few feet from the center of the conflict, pulls out her phone.


	5. dread

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> im honestly not happy with this chapter but im Really looking forward to the next few so i just said screw it and slapdashed this out

**CHAPTER FIVE**

Newt has by now watched the Paris footage so many times it’s playing on the insides of his eyelids when he tries to turn his field of vision black. The terror on the child’s face, the flash of light or energy or… something, the shaking of the ground as the footage fritzes out... And yet he’s no closer to understanding the significance of the similarities between the Paris and Tokyo incidents.

Hermann is directing his team through some ridiculously long equation on the chalkboards he’s somehow managed to convince Tendo into letting him rescue from Hong Kong. Newt knows that Hermann thinks that the lines of numbers and symbols are elegant and have some sort of intrinsic beauty or at the very least _sense_ , but from what he can see from his side of the lab they’re dealing with elementary particles or something and that’s just too much.

Newt rubs his hands together, feeling a sudden chill. Weird, he wasn’t feeling cold a second ago.

Robby taps his shoulder and he turns in his chair. The young scientist hands him a printout with a wordless but significant look. Newt takes the papers with a grim nod, unable to stop his gaze from sliding back over to Hermann’s side of the room. Hermann seems to have given up on discouraging research into the Paris incident, but Newt can sense his irritation, as well as something deeper, troubling and dangerous right below the surface… so he’s told his science team to keep quiet about it.

Robby goes back to smearing diluted Kaiju Blue onto mammalian blood slides and Newt flips through the pages, frowning. The boffins have made a list of similar events in places ranging from small Midwestern US towns to bustling South African metropolises to a research station in Siberia. While the condition to be met defined as “similar events” tends to cast a pretty wide net, it seems pretty clear that if there is a pattern, it’s speeding up. Newt thinks suddenly that Hermann would be a valuable asset in constructing a predictive model for future quakes. His heart sinks a little.

There is little evidence of children like Jude and the Paris _enfant_ at most of the other locations, though in all cases but two there were child casualties. In the report for the Long Beach, California incident, however, there is a coroner’s note.

“One of the unidentified victims, a John Doe I estimate to be about 6 years old, appears to have been infected by Kaiju Blue. I quarantined the body, but it does not appear to be spreading to any other victims, but I won’t risk the safety of the morgue. One irregularity from other cases of KB-Poisoning, however… the Blue seems to have gotten into the bloodstream.”

_This can’t be a coincidence._

Newt looks over the pictures of wreckage and mangled bodies with a grimace. Buildings collapsing, the ground opening up… things this serious can’t be accidents, right?

The last page of Robby’s packet is a screenshot of a website emblazoned with the slogan:

**_KAIJUS LONG TERM PLAN!! SLEEPER AGENTS DETONATE IN CAPE TOWN, LONG BEACH, MINSK!!_ **

Underneath this, in pen, Robby has written _Don’t take them seriously or anything, but I figured the more data the better_. _Personally reminds me of some old sci-fi TV show, but you love conspiracies, right?_

Newt brings a hand to his mouth absently, teeth scraping a knuckle. It’s crazy! Totally bonkers! Silly conspiracy theorists!

For a second Newt is torn. It _is_ quite the long shot. And he’s _supposed_ to be researching the Cure. And Hermann’s right, what evidence do they really – no. Newton Geiszler trusts his gut and his gut is telling him that these events are connected. It’s got absolutely nothing to do with wanting to prove Hermann wrong.

“Are you going to lunch, Dr Geiszler?” someone asks.

“Gimme a sec!” Newt shoves the printouts into a folder and scribbles “NG DON’T TOUCH” onto the front.

He and Hermann gravitate to each other as always, though Hermann doesn’t say anything to him when they fall into the cafeteria line together. Mako and Raleigh are already eating, picking food off each other’s trays. It’s disgustingly cute. Mako smiles at the scientists, but Raleigh is preoccupied with getting the straw into his milk.

“How’s the reconstruction going?” Newt asks.

“Very well!” Mako replies, taking Raleigh’s milk and stabbing the straw through foil. “Trains should be able to come through by this weekend!” She hands the milk back.

“My experience on the Wall of Life finally came in handy,” Raleigh rumbles around the straw.

Hermann smiles coolly (but not insincerely, Newt by now knows the difference) and takes a delicate bite of his fish. His hands are trembling. Mako gives him a searching look, but looks away when she sees Newt notice her attention.

Hermann doesn’t speak to any of them for the rest of the day.

That night, Hermann drops Newt off at his apartment, not saying a word the entire drive.

As he’s grabbing the folder he’s taken from the lab and clambering out of the car, Newt shoots a: “See you tomorrow, Hermann!” in his reticent colleague’s direction.

Hermann doesn’t respond.

Newt bites his lip but closes the door anyway.

And an hour later he’s answering the phone, dreading something he doesn’t know how to describe.

 “Newt, it’s Vanessa. Something’s wrong with Hermann!”


	6. unresponsive

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> im currently trying to find a job - im sorry updates have been so few and far between! the story is picking up soon though so... yeah

**CHAPTER SIX**

Newt buzzes into the Gottlieb’s building and runs, almost tripping over the mat in the entryway, towards the elevator. He jams the button several times, foot tapping impatiently. When the doors don’t open after ten seconds, he sighs through his nose, growls, and runs to the stairwell.

They only live on the second floor (first floor? It depends on whether you count the ground floor as the first or not, but whatever) so Newt’s there in a jiffy.

He pounds on the door.

Vanessa opens it.

She’s an English woman of Algerian descent, with long, curly black hair and a commanding presence. She has worked both as a model and as an academic. She has a doctorate, but unlike both her husband and Newt himself, she does not do much with it. During the last year, she gave birth to a child. Hermann was not there for most of the pregnancy, but he was there for the birth and has been there since.

Hermann and Vanessa’s child is named Pentecost, Penny for short. They’re tiny and brown skinned with a full head of fuzzy brown hair and big unaccountably blue eyes. Newt adores them, though he’s only spent one-on-one time with the baby twice, and then only for about an hour.

Penny cries. A lot. And eats a lot. Well, they’re a baby, so it’s forgivable, but still. Newt cannot fathom how Vanessa takes care of the baby full time and still manages to a) look amazing and b) research Newt’s kaiju-as-dinosaurs theory. Vanessa is basically Newt’s hero.

But now she looks distraught, absolutely lost like Newt has never seen her. Her eyes are not filled with tears, but the corners are red and her lower lip is trembling.

“Newt, I don’t know what to do. He won’t talk to me hardly at all – he went to lie down when he got home and he hasn’t moved since! He’s refusing to eat – I don’t feel comfortable letting Penny see him like this – ”

Newt’s mind is racing. His fingers are tightly gripping his jeans over his thighs as Vanessa leads him to the bedroom. Is Hermann sick? They work with toxic materials all day – did one of the assistants muck some safety procedure up?

The room itself is dark and stuffy. Vanessa finds the light switch but hesitates to flip it.

“Hermann? Newton is here to see you.”

“Tell him I’ll see him tomorrow,”

Hermann’s voice is weak and muffled by the duvet.

“Already here, dude. Nessa’s worried, you know.” Under normal circumstances, Hermann would have snapped at him for using the nickname, but today he doesn’t even stir. “Dude? Hermann?”

Vanessa stays hovering by the door as Newt approaches the bed. He sees a long hand, a sweaty forehead, and hair normally groomed now gone untidy, sticking up in a mess of cowlicks. His heart thuds in his ears.

He moves to pull the covers away but Hermann’s hand squeezes tight against the fabric, so he stops.

“I’m going to pull the duvet back, okay?”

No reply. Newt tugs the blanket out of Hermann’s grip and exposes the man from the waist up. He doesn’t appear abnormally flushed or pallid considering he’s been in bed for hours. Other than a slight twitch, he doesn’t respond to the removal of his duvet. More than anything else, it’s this nonresponsiveness that worries Newt most. He feels a strange sense of displacement, of wrongness about this whole situation.

“Vanessa, can you get me a thermometer?”

“We have an aural one, is that alright?”

Newt nods, leaning over Hermann’s prone form. Vanessa clicks the light on as she leaves. Hermann’s eyes twitch under their sockets, but he doesn’t open them. Newt bites his lip. “I’m going to get your heart rate, okay?” Hermann’s neck is mostly exposed (though his shoulders are hunched), so Newt places a couple fingers there and takes an incredibly unscientific measure of his pulse. It’s slow, like the other man is resting, but Newt can see the tension in Hermann’s shoulders and back and neck. He withdraws his hand. Hermann doesn’t relax.

Vanessa comes back with the thermometer. She pops a cap on and urges her husband to sit up. He doesn’t move, so Vanessa and Newt drag him into a sitting position. His eyes open but his gaze is hazy, distant. He’s looking slightly down and into the middle distance. Newt clenches his teeth.

Hermann’s temperature is within a reasonable range. Newt and Vanessa gently ease him onto his back, but he doesn’t adjust his position. His eyes don’t close. He looks tortured, curled slightly into himself with tensed muscles and a vacant expression. As Newt and Vanessa turn to each other to discuss what to do, he speaks, sounding like every syllable took enormous effort.

“Please… Leave me alone. I’m not sick. Just tired.”

“I’ve seen you tired, dear, and this is… this is different!”

Hermann’s eyes briefly focus on Vanessa, then flick away and close.

“I’m sorry,” he mutters, so quietly Newt thinks he might have imagined it.

Vanessa puts a hand over her eyes and nose, stifling what might be a sob, might be an exasperated laugh. “For what, dear?”

Hermann is unresponsive again.

Newt knows from their Drift and the few personal talks he’s had with the other man that Hermann’s childhood was hellish. He’s certainly dealt with feelings this deep and dark before, but feelings that don’t have a _cause_? Feelings like this that are so insidious they make you think that they’re your fault, that you just don’t know how to feel things _right_?

Newt knows those all too well.

In the back of his mind, something clicks, though he doesn’t want to admit it.

“Vanessa…. Call Tendo.”


	7. explication

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tendo comes over. Exposition ensues.

**CHAPTER SEVEN**

Newt grips the Gottlieb’s phone tightly, drumming his fingers against the side as he waits, tense and anxious, for Tendo to pick up. Beside him, Vanessa cradles the baby to her breast; Penny will get their dinner completely oblivious to the crisis currently going on. The woman gives Newt a searching look, perfectly shaped eyebrows low and close together.

“Why Tendo?” she murmurs over the dial tone that echoes out of the handset.

Newt looks at her, feeling helpless. “He’s the only one who might know what’s going on. Tendo’s a smart guy! Not as smart as me or Hermann but, well… Hermann’s out of commission and I need help,”

Vanessa puts a perfectly manicured hand on his shoulder. She knows how hard admitting weakness is for Newt. In this way he and her husband are very similar.

Tendo finally picks up, sounding tired. He doesn’t get enough sleep. Was he napping at work? Newt tries to shut his racing thoughts off so he can simply relay information. Tendo gets the gist quickly and agrees to get over to the apartment post haste.

After Newt hangs up, Vanessa stands. “I’m going to try to put Penny to bed, dear.” Her eyes are not tear-filled any longer, but her hand trembles at her baby’s head briefly as she strokes Newt’s hair in an unconscious mirroring of her care for her child. “If you don’t mind being alone until Tendo gets here,”

Newt nods. Alone or with Vanessa’s company, he won’t be able to calm down until Hermann is giving him a look of scorn and insisting that wild theories are no substitute for hard facts. Not until he can look into Hermann’s face and see _Hermann_ again, and not – not anyone else.

He spends the next ten minutes resolutely distracting himself, trying to recite the periodic table, to map the threads in the carpet at his feet, to list Royksopp’s full discography, including remixes.

Tendo knocks – _finally_ – and finds the door open. Newt gets off the couch at the same time that Tendo enters the apartment.

The other man opens with: “Has he changed at all since you called?”

“Not that I know of, but I’ve been waiting out here, so…”

Tendo glances around the apartment, clearly looking for wherever they had Hermann stashed. “Is he well enough for me to talk to him?”

Apologetically, Newt shakes his head. He gestures to the couch. When Tendo sits down, he takes his previous position on the cushions and continues, trying not to show how distraught he’s feeling. “This is a full blown depressive episode, almost definitely. He barely talked to me or Vanessa. I kind of doubt he’ll open up to your tender loving care. No offense,”

“None taken, Doctor…” Tendo gives Newt a slightly twisted look, like he wants to admonish him and give him a hug at the same time. “In any case… do you think this is related to his – and your – unusual behavior lately?”

“You’re going to have to be more specific,” He grins crookedly, sarcastically, as if he doesn’t know exactly what Tendo is talking about.

“Mr. Becket and Ms. Mori, among others, have brought your recent odd behavior to my attention. You’ve both been overly sensitive to certain sensations, you’ve been fighting over things that, even for you two, are trivial… You haven’t been acting like yourselves. To put it bluntly, Dr. Geizsler, I and the others think that you and Dr. Gottlieb have been…” He waits a beat, then continues: “Well, there’s really no other way to say it. You’ve been ghost drifting,”

 He waits with an expressionless face for Newt’s response. Newt is uncharacteristically silent for a moment, but then he explodes: “We drifted _once_! And I don’t know if you can even _call_ what we did a real Neural Handshake!”

Deep down, though, he knows Tendo is right. Why else would he have called him if not to confirm his suspicions?

Tendo runs a hand over his pompadour. “We can’t predict when these things will happen. But the signs are all there, in spades! You’ve been sharing sensations, haven’t you? And hearing each other’s thoughts? Raleigh and Mako aren’t the only ones who’ve noticed!”

“So you’re who Kou’s been relaying all that to,” The question has been tickling the back of his mind for a while. “Great, dude! Thanks for not just _asking_. Real friendly. Shows you care,” Newt struggles to keep the pitch and levels of his voice under control. Hormone regimen be damned, he squeaks like a teenager when he’s upset.

Tendo gestures apologetically. “I had to know for sure. And, well… something this major is a pretty good indicator that you two have some major problems,”

“Thanks.” Newt bites out. “How the fuck do we fix this?”

Newt’s boss doesn’t flinch at the profanity, though Newt knows he doesn’t approve. “I – we –  don’t really know. It’s not a simple thing to fix.”

Newt rolls his eyes. “Really? The minds of two people blending outside of a physical link isn’t simple? Thanks for enlightening me, dude. Really appreciate it,” Faced with Tendo’s serious, rueful frown, Newt slumps over, fingers twitching against the couch. “Is there _anything_ we can do?” he asks, not looking straight at Tendo but rather obliquely at the door to Hermann’s bedroom.

The bow tied man nods. “We don’t know much about this type of psychic link, let alone understand it. Those who have ghost drifted in the past say that getting closer – emotionally, psychically – helps somewhat,”

“How much closer psychically can we possibly freakin’ get?” Newt  hisses his breath out between his teeth, trying to reign in his hostility and sarcasm. It’s getting more and more difficult the longer he’s left worrying about Hermann. To make things harder, he’s recently found himself being a little more prickly than he’s been in the past, and now is no exception. Figures.

Tendo gently presses his hand to Newt’s forearm, not leaving it there for too long but making his presence known, as a comfort and as a warning. He continues as if Newt didn’t interrupt.

“We think, from the testimony of Jaeger pilots and our limited understanding og the abilities of the human mind, that ghosting only happens when the unconscious minds sense something in the drift that the conscious minds haven’t acknowledged. It can be anger, or grief, or even joy – but the pilots have never actually said it out loud to each other,” He gestures with one hand as he speaks. He appears to be very interested in the subject.

Newt speaks up, unable to stay silent for long: “I think I get what you’re saying. Full disclosure, right? Honesty is the best policy? A heart heavy with secrets? Or, I guess, a mind heavy with secrets.”

“It goes a little deeper than that, but you’ve got the gist of it…”

“So what? We have a heart to heart and this all goes away?” Newt clings to the concept like a life preserver. If this is something he can fix, then he will fix it and everything can go back to normal. He will survive this. He’s survived drifting with a Kaiju, he’s survived drifting with _Hermann_ , and he’s survived being trans and bipolar and more than a little rude in a military environment. But he can’t help worrying (he never can, and that’s something he really hates about himself when he gets in situations he has no control over like this one) that maybe this will be the last straw for him. And he worries even more about Hermann.

Though Tendo can clearly tell how much Newt wants him to lie, he remains honest: “No. We guess that the major symptoms will go away – the personality changes, the shared sensations, the disassociation – but the little things? Well… there’s never been a recorded case of ghosting that was this intense or long-lasting… We think that your interaction with the kaiju hivemind may have strengthened the mental bond between you to the extent that… well, you may never be able to break it.” He puts his hand on Newt’s hand this time. “We can’t know anything for sure. This is uncharted territory.

Tendo’s eyes, usually dancing with mirth even in the most official of circumstances, look deeply sorrowful. He squeezes Newt’s hand once then releases it.

“The only thing you can do is go back in there and hope to God that you can get through to him.”


End file.
